The development process of an application program for radio communication devices and the like involves evaluation of how much electric power is consumed by the hardware platform with the application program running thereon. There are several techniques for estimating and evaluating power consumption of application programs.
For example, one proposed method performs multiple regression analysis on the samples of load of a central processing unit (CPU) and other parameters, formulates therefrom a linear approximation formula for evaluating power consumption, and estimates power consumption of an application program under development by using that formula. Another proposed method collects measurements of power consumption for each individual process module constituting an application under development and estimates therefrom the power consumption of the application program as a whole. See, for example, the following documents:
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2010-225133
Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2003-345472
The power consumption of an application program varies with the load conditions during its execution. For this reason, the linear approximation-based estimation method noted above is configured to run application programs several times under different load conditions and use the resulting data to produce a linear approximation formula. The method therefore spends a lot of time to determine the modeling parameters for power estimation. In other words, it takes a long time to collect data about power consumption.